Ideally, a marketing plot like this would result in a nice split… but that doesn’t feel true in this particular case. The Thunderbolts, being a surreptitious way of assembling a new version of Earth’s Mightiest Heroe,s always seemed like the most obvious answer to the presented riddle, and I was hoping for something a bit more advanced.

Now that Thunderbolts* is in theaters, the Marvel marketing machine is revealing why there's an asterisk in the film's title.